Wednesday, July 6, 2011

The Future of BI Is Now

I’ve spent a meaningful number of days so far this year traveling the globe. Following on from our JasperWorld conference (February, San Francisco) and other events in the United States, I’ve met with customers and spoke at conferences in Australia, Singapore, Thailand, Japan, Germany, Holland, Austria, London and Paris. In all my conversations, what I’m struck by is just how quickly third-generation business intelligence architectures are being embraced and deployed within organizations of all sizes. I find it heartening, even encouraging.

As backdrop and for further reference, I’ve written relatively extensively about the “Future of BI” and related concepts in my TDWI column, called “The BI Revolution.” You can review four specifically-related articles:

These articles describe how the growing volume of data represents real opportunity for those organizations that strategically understand how to exploit it, and that more commonly, many of these organizations are choosing to create their own analytic applications to deliver keen insight affordably to a wide business user audience.

Additionally, the new BI platforms best designed to enable these modern, scalable, and lower-cost uses are built fundamentally differently than their predecessors . . . but one thing that’s common regardless of platform generation is the rise of the real hero in the BI solution equation: the BI Builder. The BI Builder is the technical steward who manages to unite business requirements and data with BI technology, enabling greater success (and more pervasive) use of BI than what’s been typically possible in the past.

My conversations with customers and community members in each of the cities I visited provided welcome testimony that the concepts and practices described in my previous articles are, indeed, being realized. From small government and not-for-profit organizations to global 2000 corporations (and everything in between), I met with BI Builders who are uniting internal and external data and delivering new views of this data to business users who are able to make better, faster, fact-based decisions than ever before. In all these cases, the implementation costs were a small fraction of what they would have been just 5-7 years ago – while the number of users reached in many cases was large and growing, uninhibited by per-seat charges complex user interfaces, and hard-to-maintain installations that commonly stall sizable BI deployments.

The new examples I uncovered make me proud that Jaspersoft is playing an important part in this BI revolution. And they reminded me that the future of BI really is now.

I will be describing several of these customer examples in future posts. In the meantime, I’d be interested in your feedback on my TDWI articles or any of my points here.